The Need to Touch Medical Virtual Environments?

Haptics technologies are frequently used in virtual environments to allow participants to touch virtual objects. Medical applications are no exception and a wide variety of commercial and bespoke haptics hardware solutions have been employed to aid in the simulation of medical procedures. Intuitively the use of haptics will improve the training of the task. However, little evidence has been published to prove that this is indeed the case. In the paper we summarise the available evidence and use a case study from interventional radiology to discuss the question of how important is it to touch medical virtual environments?